Network systems are utilized as communication links for everyday personal and business purposes. With the growth of network systems, particularly the Internet, and the advancement of computer hardware and software technology, network use ranges from simple communication exchanges such as electronic mail to more complex and data intensive communication sessions such as web browsing, electronic commerce, and numerous other electronic network services such as Internet voice, and Internet video-on-demand.
Several important technological changes are key drivers in creating increasing demand for timely and cost-effective collection of Internet usage information. One technological change is the dramatically increasing Internet access bandwidth at moderate subscriber cost. Most consumers today have only limited access bandwidth to the Internet via an analog telephony modem, which has a practical data transfer rate upper limit of about 56 thousand bits per second. When a network service provider's subscribers are limited to these slow rates, there is a limit to the subscriber's ability to overload the service provider's network. However, the increasing wide scale deployments of broadband Internet access through digital cable modems, digital subscriber line, microwave, and satellite services are increasing the Internet access bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. As such, this higher access bandwidth significantly increases the potential for network congestion and bandwidth abuse by heavy users. With this much higher bandwidth available, the usage difference between a heavy user and light user can be quite large. This difference can make a fixed-price, all-you-can-use pricing plan difficult to sustain. If the service provider charges too much for the service, the light users will be subsidizing the heavy users; if the service provider charges too little, the heavy users will abuse the available network bandwidth, which will be costly for the service provider.
Additionally, there has been a shift to real-time delivery requirements. Along with this shift, there has been an accompanying need to measure quality of service delivered. For example, the network provider might track or verify that all information during a download session is delivered to the subscriber and not just part of the requested information.
Another technological change is the rapid growth of applications and services that require high bandwidth. Examples include Internet telecommunications, video-on-demand, and complex multiplayer multimedia games. These types of services increase the duration of time that a user is connected to the network as well as increase the bandwidth required to supply the service.
Another technological change is the transition of the Internet from “best effort” to “mission critical.” As many businesses are moving to the Internet, they are increasingly relying on this medium for their daily success. This transitions the Internet from a casual, best-effort delivery service into a mainstream and critical part of commerce.
Due to the above driving forces, among others, Internet service providers are moving from current, fixed-rate, all-you-can-use Internet access billing plans to more complex billing plans, these plans charge by metrics, such as volume of data transferred, bandwidth utilized, service used, time-of-day, and subscriber class, which defines a similar group of subscribers by their usage profile, organizational affiliation, or other attributes. An example of such a rate structure might include a fixed monthly rate portion, a usage allocation to be included as part of the fixed monthly rate (a threshold), plus a variable rate portion for usage beyond the allocation (or threshold). For a given service provider there will be many such rate structures for the many possible combinations of services and subscriber classes.
Network usage data recording systems are utilized for collecting, correlating, and aggregating network usage information as it occurs (in real time or near real time). These systems are also utilized for creating IDRs as output that can be consumed by computer business systems that support the above business functions. It may be necessary to correlate different types of network usage data obtained from independent network data sources to obtain information required by certain usage applications.
For billing applications, network usage data is correlated with network session information. Network usage data for a given usage event typically includes a source Internet protocol (IP) address, a destination IP address interconnect data, byte count or packet counts (i.e., amount of data transferred across a given connection) and a time stamp. Network usage data does not identify the user or billing party that actually performed the action or usage event. Network session information typically includes a source IP address, a time stamp (e.g., start time and end time) and a user name or account name. A usage application for billing purposes requires user names and byte counts. As such, network usage data must be correlated with network session information in order to create a usage record having an association between a billable account and the usage event.
Many service providers have the ability to offer consolidated voice and data products with bundled discounts and one-rate packages combining different services. To pull these services together, however, service providers must combine components from several different partners, suppliers (switch venders, gateway venders, billing venders, etc.) and the their own internal systems. Integrating distributed, product-oriented systems with new customer-oriented systems has been a challenging problem. One known solution is a usage mediation and management platform commercially available under the tradename Internet Usage Manager from Hewlett-Packard Company. The Internet Usage Manager mediation and management platforms supports pre-paid and post-paid billing models for wire-line and wireless networks carrying voice and data services. Other usage data recording systems are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 09/559,438; 09/559,693; 09/560,032; and 09/578,826, all of which are commonly assigned to Hewlett-Packard Company. These usage data recording systems provide a scalable, distributed architecture to collect, aggregate and correlate usage data from service infrastructure and provide results to business support systems for billing and strategic market analysis.
With the complexity of usage-based billing due to the various data sources and data types, the problem of revenue leakage also exists. Although exact figures of revenue loss are rarely public data, estimates of 5-15 percent losses of total revenue are not uncommon. The reduction or elimination of revenue leakage would help ensure that subscribers are billed completely and accurately.